A little space problem: uncovering structural criticism in William Gaddis’ JR

Abstract

ABSTRACT William Gaddis’ National Book Award winning JR is often read as a novel of ‘entropy’ or ‘chaos,’ and held out as an ‘ur-text’ (in Jonathan Franzen's phrase) of apolitical literary experimentation in late-century America. Yet JR delineates, in its obsessive interest with the built environment, the structural changes taking place at the height of American neoliberalisation. This paper recovers those structural criticisms by uncovering them – by considering the way the novel’s wayward language blankets, fills, and changes space. I begin by delineating the structures that produce, house, or result from the novel’s ‘chaotic’ language, arguing that the dominant discourse of this novel, rather than random, is a specifically ‘neoliberal discourse.’ I clarify the way neoliberal discourse reshapes space by relating it to Lefebvre’s ‘abstract space,’ before considering the political possibilities Gaddis attributes to these spaces, as well as to experimental literature itself. This reading expands our understanding of the politics and formal strategies not only of this novel but of the period’s experimental literature more generally, offering JR as an ur-text not of nihilistic difficulty but of a critical literary practice grounded in an experimental aesthetics that seeks to both capture and criticise emergent changes wrought by neoliberalism.